Clean this

From today’s editorials: Legislative leaders drop the ball in making sure than tens of millions of dollars are being properly spent on a brownfield cleanup and development program.

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Two years after the state overhauled a woefully flawed program that was supposed to encourage cleanup and redevelopment of polluted properties, it’s reasonable to ask whether the tens of millions of dollars this venture costs taxpayers are finally being spent wisely.

Good luck getting an answer.

The state Legislature’s leaders — with one exception — are apparently too busy or distracted to comply with their own legislation, which required them to appoint an oversight panel for the brownfield cleanup program. For all anyone knows, it’s as wasteful as ever.

Who is minding the store at the Capitol?

If anyone needed reminding of how badly designed the program was when it was created in 2003, Times Union reporter Brian Nearing pulled together some infuriating statistics. Of the $362 million that this program cost taxpayers in 2007 and 2008, $327 million — 90 percent — went to subsidize buildings, not to clean up pollution. And while 52 projects around the state participated in the program, most of the money went to a few big, costly ventures, most or all of which would undoubtedly have happened without public support.

Those include a $550 million luxury Ritz-Carlton hotel, office and residential project in White Plains. A politically connected developer, Louis Cappelli, enjoyed $110 million in tax credits from the program because the site had hosted a gas station where gasoline and oil had leaked. Another $47 million worth of state tax credits helped build a $235 million, luxury apartment building in Manhattan, while $21 million went toward a $140 million headquarters tower in Manhattan for Barry Diller — who, as owner of Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster and the Lending Tree, was the nation’s highest paid CEO in 2006, with earnings of $469 million.

In most of these big-ticket projects, the tax credits went to the buildings, not to pollution cleanup.

The state supposedly corrected this situation in 2008, limiting the subsidies projects could receive to three times the cost of the actual pollution cleanup or $35 million, whichever is less.

So how’s it going? Hard to tell. The 2008 reforms called for an advisory panel to monitor and report on the program. The report was due two months ago. Problem is, there is no panel to write it. While Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver named a representative to the committee, none of the other legislative leaders — Senate Democratic Majority Leader John L. Sampson, Republican Minority Leader Dean Skelos, and Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb — have done so.